Over 2.5 million people worldwide suffer from Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and over a quarter of a million children and adults suffer from some form of joint contracture. Joint contracture is a stiffening of the muscles near the joints that can make it difficult for individuals to move. In some cases, this leads to joints locking in a painful position.
Physical therapy, especially regular stretching, is important in helping to enhance the range of motion for affected muscles and to prevent or delay contractures. Physical therapy can also help maintain muscle tone and reduce the severity of joint contractures. With regular exercise, muscles are kept strong and joints more flexible. It is believed that strengthening supporting muscle groups to compensate for weakened muscle groups might be beneficial to patients with early stages of Muscular Dystrophy (MD).
People with various forms of debilitating illnesses, such as Multiple Sclerosis (MS), Charcot-Marie-Tooth (CMT), and Muscular Dystrophy (MD) suffer from progressive weakness, pain, and degeneration of skeletal muscles that are required for voluntary movement. For treatment, these people often seek the assistance of a physical therapist, chiropractor, or other medical practitioner in order to alleviate their discomfort. A physical therapist will often resort to stretching techniques to ease a patient's discomfort—positioning the patient on a therapy table and manually stretching and manipulating the patient's body. This can be physically demanding for the therapist. The lower extremities are especially difficult to manipulate because of their length, size, and weight.
A need therefore existed for an automated therapy table which may be controlled by a physical therapist or other medical practitioner to actuate various component portions of the table in order to move parts of a person's body, specifically the lower extremities, in a desired direction for a desired period of time without causing physical stress to the physical therapist or medical practitioner. All of the functions of the automated therapy table, accompanied by the thought process of the patient assisting in the direction of every movement, help to rehabilitate and strengthen muscles.